"The pain is bad magicians ripping off good ones, doing magic badly, and making a mockery of the art."
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Quote collection
Ricky Jay quotes (page 1 of 2)
34 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"For me, the most exciting thing is to create good magic that's entertaining for an audience, and it would be lovely if a magician was fooled as well."
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"Every acting gig isn't the same, every writing job isn't the same, every live performance isn't the same - the challenge is the level of difficulty or ease, and that may vary."
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"The book says we may be through with the past but the past ain't through with us."
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"Not only do I lie, I take real pleasure in lying, in the transmission of magic effects."
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"My father was the Formica King of Long Island, and my mother was the daughter of a Bengal Lancer in India."
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"I love amazing people. I love dazzling them. That's why I think performing magic is one of the greatest things a person can do."
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"One of the reasons I don't like to use the word "tricks" , I do think of them as theatrical pieces, and as pretentious as that might sound, there's a real reason for it. It's not the idea of tricking you; it's the idea of taking you along on this particular journey the way you would in any other theatrical situation. But, hopefully, you're going to be fooled at the end."
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"I never talk much about my family, but my grandfather was friendly with these guys, with magicians and ventriloquists on the highest levels, and I was just interested."
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"I certainly was performing before my writing was published, because I was performing when I was very young. And the thing is I'm very comfortable on stage, so a large portion of my act did come from ad-libs."
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"I suppose that if I could only do one thing, a solid card effect would be pretty high on the list. That's the root of it all, sleight-of-hand. It's certainly the thing I feel most comfortable with."
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"If it sounds too good to be true, it always is."
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"I grew up like Athena — covered with playing cards instead of armor — and, at the age of seven, materialized on a TV show, doing magic."
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"Magic is a powerful art that can support a weak performer."
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"I always read what I write out loud, and I did that long before any radio thing. My editor finds that unusual."
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"I started doing radio pieces with no clear, preconceived idea, except that I have a tendency to be theatrical."
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"Writing is the only thing in my life that doesn't get easier. It just doesn't."
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"I think the toughest thing about being an actor in a film is to be with a director who doesn't know what they want. And that can be really, really frustrating."
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"In the winters, I enrolled in the hotel management program at Cornell University. I naively thought that I knew something about sleight-of-hand, entertainment and food, and that would be all I needed."
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"That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms."
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